brantgoose:1. Scott Adams likes to play the Devil's Advocate. He's not crazy, but in any given group of readers, many will fail to see the joke, miss the "what if", or totally go batshiat crazy when their hobby horses are kicked in the fetlocks (which are not "flowing in the wind"--that would be the mane--but even Dr. Johnson, the lexicographer, got his definition of "fetlocks" from "sheer ignorance, Madam").

2. Scott Adams is a bit naive. Well, quite niave outside of his areas of competence, which are many. Many of the ideas he throws out are wrong, even perversely wrong. This doesn't hurt an engineer or a cartoonist. It doesn't even hurt an investor if they are quick and clever. But it gives trolls, whiners, enemies and other types of people a handle to claim you are a fool. For example, the headline does not match the article. Headline says he's a crazy conspiracist who believes the Big Players are connected by psychic links. The article actually quotes him saying that no psychic links are needed--they just have to watch the other Big Players and play follow the leader. This is how business, politics, and the media really work. This is almost tautologically true. The Big Players don't give a damn about what the little guys do (unless they do it all at once, playing follow the leader, in which case they can cause a brief boom or crash). The Big Players are playing for high stakes.

3. Scott Adams is a bit of a friendly troll, who likes to provoke argument and thought but often rushes in where angels fear to tread.

4. Scott Adams is a liberal-conservative and thus likely to provoke both conservatives and liberals (especially genuine leftists, some of whom are quite cranky). He sits at the edge of the God-Evolution debate, for example, and drives both sides crazy with his ideas thrown out like sparks in dry tender.

Basically Adams' theory works if you make the following assumption or premise the basis of your analysis: the Big Players mostly take their profits together. N ...

Mrtraveler01:vygramul: One of the things that is always amusing is when pundits tell their followers who it is the other side listens to. In this case, Sophia Vergara? What the hell has she to do with it?

Is she the one on Modern Family with the thick accent?

And why am I supposed to care about Sean Penn again? I know the Conservatives blogs keep telling me I'm supposed to for whatever reason, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why.

Sean Penn's heyday was during the 1980s, which is the time of the Republicans' creation myth ("And the eternal Rea'Gonn did pluck a hair from its back and planted it in the fertile soil of Greede. It grew at once into a mewling babe which the Rea'Gonn did suckle at its teat"). Everything from that period is magnified in significance as a result. That's why so many Republicans wear parachute pants.